Two cousins, Corporal Walshe and Corporal Parland, Irishmen, were shot dead very soon after the engagement opened, but the absence of ambulance arrangements prevented those who were wounded in the advanced position from falling back to the rear. With a quiet and unsuspected courage they just stopped where they were shot until they could muster sufficient strength to drag themselves to the rear. Each wounded form became, as it crawled along, the objective of the Boer rifle fire, and no few of those who had been hit in action were hit again as they made their way to the field hospital. Here Major Anderson, with whom I remained from the moment of my arrival until we retired--who told me afterwards that it was a mere chance which caused him to accompany the squadron to the field, since in the confusion and din no one had thought to give him his orders--was busily dressing the men as they came in. The total area of the improvised dressing station was perhaps half a dozen yards; into that crowded six or seven horses, seven or eight wounded men, the Surgeon-Major, his orderly, and all those others who made their way through the firing-line from time to time. There seemed to be indescribable confusion in this little spot. The wounded men lay between horses' legs, rested upon one another, crouched against the walls of the huts, each recognising that the situation was one of gravity, and endeavouring to assist so far as he was able; those who were not too severely wounded helped to undress those who had been less fortunately hit, and to each as he fell back from the firing-line to have his wounds dressed, there was thrown a merry jest from his comrades. The nature of the wounds created no little interest among the men, since it was the first time that any one had seen the effect, upon human beings, of the Mauser bullets. One man as he came back was advised not to sit down; another man, with extraordinary coolness in seeing the nature of his wounds, which were seven, exclaimed with a quaint blasphemy, that it still might be possible for him to enjoy the functions of a married man. But if this were the scene at the hospital base, the scene at our firing-line and at that upon the Boer side was very different. We possibly occupied a line of front some eighty yards in extent, and as the Boers saw that the hospital hut was becoming the centre of our position, so they extended their lines until a direct cross fire from the extremities of the two flanks were added to the direct fire from the centre; each man, therefore, was under a converging fire from three distinct points, and had it not been that the Boers' aim was not so good as their range our losses would have been much more serious than has happily proved to be the case. We could see the Boers sitting in the branches of the trees; we could see them crouching beneath bushes; we could detect them, from the fire of their rifles, in the shelter of the rocks and in the depths of the sluits.